Wounded I Am More Awake, by Julia Lieblich and Esad Boskailo

After enduring a Croatian concentration camp in 1993, where he was brutalized by his own neighbors, Boskailo came to Chicago with his family and tried to restart his life. Trained as a physician in Bosnia, Boskailo became a psychiatrist in the U.S. because he wanted to help other survivors of atrocities and trauma. Journalist Lieblich devotes the first half of the book to Boskailo’s experience as a Bosnian Muslim, the second to his halting efforts to be a wounded healer. Boskailo found that neither psychiatric training nor his own suffering made him useful to others. What victims need is simply someone who listens to their story and believes it and who is patient enough to give them space and time to attach themselves to life again.